Stars
by loki-laufeyson-of-asgard
Summary: Lloyd stands at the window of his hotel room and thinks about Flagg.


Vegas was quiet at night now. Lloyd never would've expected he'd see such a thing, yet here he was in the middle of it all, standing at the window of his room—a room which likely used to cost well over a thousand dollars a night—overlooking the great dark strip, and beyond the vast blank stretch of the desert. They'd gotten a few lights working again—mostly low wattage streetlamps, none of the neon yet, or the fountains, or even WELCOME TO FABULOUS LAS VEGAS—but their combined dim glow was not enough to blot out the stars. They pinwheeled and stretched out over the black hole where the desert lay. Over Caesar's Palace and the Bellagio. Lloyd felt he could reach out and touch them, their burning cores. Though of course their brilliance would be nothing compared to the

_(thing)_

man to whom he'd become so attached in the last few weeks. It sounded like something out of one of those Harlequin romance novels the girls he'd dated would read, cheap and trashy and meaningless. But Lloyd was (perhaps reluctantly, perhaps accompanied by a slight shudder) aware that it was very, very real now: if he wanted to touch the stars, Flagg would make it possible. He would, and he could, and he'd do it laughing. Lloyd could nearly hear him: _You mean you want me to kill everyone just so you can touch something pretty? _and then maybe, softer, sibilant: _Why don't you just touch yourself, Lloyd? If you're that eager for it._

He shivered, though the night was warm where he'd thrown the window partially open. He was clad only in his shorts, the carpet soft under his bare feet. It was the sort of carpet he might've dreamed about at one point in his life as some unattainable luxury. Between dead rabbits and terrible criminal friends Lloyd hadn't had much room for softness in his life.

His hand slid down his stomach to just above the waistline of his shorts. Then he stopped. He slid it back up and took the pendant between his fingers. It was heavy and cold on his skin as ever. Staring out at the night he lifted the pendant to his eye level. The red flaw glowed a little. Like it was trying to compete with the stars. Lloyd took a deep breath. Then he brought it to his mouth. He sucked it in.

Instantly the stone began to warm with his body heat. He closed his eyes and ran his tongue over the smooth surface of it, feeling the lightly jagged place at the center. The chill was dissipating and as it did Lloyd again slid his hand down—this time past the waistband of his shorts, until he'd wrapped it around himself. He stroked slowly, punctuated by rolls of his tongue. The pendant was attached to a chain; he wasn't worried about swallowing so much as he was about getting lost in it—and yet he wasn't. He opened his eyes and stared at the stars and imagined Flagg lassoing them and crashing them to the earth, one by one, until they'd splintered the strip and its false light and left only him. Him and Lloyd, maybe. Maybe.

He heard his door click; the familiar fall of boot heels, and then there was a hand on his shoulder. Flagg had strange fingers, a little too long, slender. They radiated heat. All of him radiated heat as he stood there behind Lloyd with his thumb pressing into the nape of Lloyd's neck and his cock half-hard in his tight jeans, nudging against Lloyd's hip.

He said, "I felt you take me in your mouth."

Lloyd whimpered around the stone. He couldn't stop stroking himself, a little harder now, a little faster. Flagg's hand wasn't—_quite_—coaxing his, but it was a close thing. Slowly he turned from the window. Flagg's hand ran along his shoulders as he moved, never breaking contact. When they were facing each other—or rather, when Flagg was facing Lloyd; you didn't really _face _Flagg, you just stared in his direction if you dared and hoped he wasn't bored and in an obliterating mood—Lloyd took another deep breath. His wrist moving choppily in his shorts he rounded his tongue against the stone, flattening it to the flaw, and _sucked. _

Instantly he was on the floor. The carpet was soft on his back as it had been on his feet, but he barely noticed for the burn it gave him as Flagg shoved him up against it, his fingers flying against his belt buckle. Lloyd's legs were positioned accordingly and the stone was removed from his mouth—burning hot now—so that Flagg could kiss him, at once brutal and strangely tender, scraping at his lower lip with teeth a little too sharp, sucking it into his own mouth, and hissing, half in Lloyd's head:

_Mine. _

It was much later, when Flagg and Lloyd had both spent themselves out and were laying together in a sweat-soaked tangle on the floor, clothes rumpled in the corner, Lloyd's cigarette burning into the coal-black night, that Lloyd realized perhaps his taking the pendant in his mouth had been something more even than just sexual. That perhaps—as Flagg stroked over his arm with those strange fingers and Lloyd fiddled idly with the pendant where it lay beside him in the crook of his neck—it had been a declaration of possession too.

That perhaps, somehow, miraculously, Flagg, the dark man, he who could call down the stars and destroy the world, didn't mind.


End file.
